“Our relationship with literary characters and with the authors who created them are what brought us to reading. Our love of reading is what brought us to teaching the English language arts. In some way then, literary characters made us what we are today.” pg 20

In chapter two, authors Smith and Wilhelm explain what they see as what really matters about teaching literary characterization. For starters they say that getting to know literary characters should be carried out in the same manner in which we get to know the flesh-and -blood folks who populate our lives. So just how do we do that?

1) We create a general impression on the basis of a person's traits.
2) We recognize that some characteristics matter more than others.
3) We create expectations on the basis of group membership.

As leaders in the classroom, we must consider the instructional implications of these tendencies. Considering how important each of these factors is not only in literature but also in life, we must guide the students to do the following:

- recognize not only a character's particular traits but also how those traits interact to form an overall impression of the character.

- recognize when they ought to modify their first impression.

- test stereotypes against the individuating information they glean from the text.

- try on the various perspectives of the characters about whom they are reading.


Problems with Traditional Instruction

Many of the traditional units presented with the intent of teaching characterization share common flaws:

- they emphasize declarative (knowing) rather than procedural (doing) knowledge. “Technical vocabulary associated with characterization doesn't help readers do anything, ...” pg 28

- they don't lend themselves to transfer. “Answering questions that the teacher asks cannot help students do the kind of mindful abstraction they need to do to transfer what we teach them to new situations.” pg 28

- they don't reflect the way we understand people in our lives. “...although building from the bottom up is crucially important, so too is developing a general impression and then checking it against details.” pg. 29

Keeping this in mind , we can use the following ideas to critique lessons presenting characterization.

Application - - Ideas to critique a characterization literature lesson

- Does the lesson help students develop procedural knowledge?
- Does it cause them to reflect what we do when we try to understand people in our own lives?
- Does it foster transfer to other works and to life?

Preparing Students to Understand Character

Given how critically important understanding characters is to understanding literature, it's crucial to take some time to help students understand just what they ought to be up to when they are working to understand characters. This means both helping students understand the importance of the instructional implications discussed above and helping them avoid two often seen mistakes.

- focusing on external traits rather than internal traits. Students can easily tell you that a character is short, tall, etc .but find it difficult to say they are curious or greedy. According to the authors of this work, “external traits are noteworthy only when they tell us something deeper about the character.”

- focusing on states (e.g. She was happy when she won.) instead of traits (e.g. She is a happy person.)


The activities which will follow in our next blog are designed to help students avoid these problems and to enact the four instructional implications important to characterization discussed above.


Stay tuned.